Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

by Bozio, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780198846567
• ISBN10: 0198846568
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-03-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings —not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorize and thematize the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theater altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.

Author Biography

Andrew Bozio, Assistant Professor of English, Skidmore College, USA

Andrew Bozio is an Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. His research interests include early modern literature and culture, and critical theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage
1. Forms of Emplacement: The Arts of Memory, Chorography, and Theatrical Performance
2. Marlowe and the Ecology of Remembrance
3. The Perception of Place in King Lear
4. Staging Failure: Disorientation in The Knight of the Burning Pestle
5. Bartholomew Fair and the Performativity of Place
Conclusion: 'no need of place'